D&D 5E Intelligence and Wisdom Checks (Skills) as GM Tool for Plot Rationing or Expository Dump

[Sadras]

Those 52 % of you in the "sometimes or more" category:

Are you guys all running Adventure Paths or at least some sort of metaplot-driven-game?

Yes I'm currently running a sandbox with the STK and ToD backdrop. The characters are free to pursue the metaplot should they so wish (they currently are) or veer completely off course and ditch it entirely. One character has a reason to travel to Sigil and another has the goal of hunting and stopping an individual from resurrecting a dead god.

Are any of you using 'Success at a Cost' (DMG 242) and could you see the following action resolution handling occur in your game?

I find I might use either scenario and yes I do use Success at a Cost.
In scenario (a) if the location of the Dawnmoat was predetermined then the character would have to try discover it another away (if possible).

 

[Coroc]

@Manbearcat

How else would you resolve situations in which you cannot determine for sure if something is player wits / knowledge / logical deduction or the characters' ?

Physical stats STR DEX CON of a character are far more decoupled from the player. Even charisma in the sense of comeliness is.

Int and Wis are things were a player easily can surpass a character, it is imho very difficult for a player to play a character who is superior to his IRL mental capabilities, but otoh I find myself frequently putting my logical capabilities as my characters own, without to much thinking whether he would be smart enough .(Unless I play someone edgy stupid e.g. a character so dull that he cannot even communicate normally)

 

[Manbearcat]

@Coroc

I think you're asking something fundamentally different than what I'm asking in the lead post.

Are you wanting to know the broad question of "what are the possible ways that player wit/knowledge/deduction skills might be used in play"or "how else can a GM plot ration/information dump if not through int/knowledge skills?"

 

[Coroc]

@Coroc

I think you're asking something fundamentally different than what I'm asking in the lead post.

Are you wanting to know the broad question of "what are the possible ways that player wit/knowledge/deduction skills might be used in play"or "how else can a GM plot ration/information dump if not through int/knowledge skills?"

I get what you wanted to say, and what you did ask in the OP, and sorry for me generalizing this a bit, since it is not limited to plot and other information. I think it is a good way to check e.g. Int or sleight of hand, for figuring out how a mechanical device works, even if the player with his IRL knowledge absolutely would figure it out by e.g. its picture or description (Or not ).
I also would use that if e.g. from clues e.g. cutscenes for dramatics with no character being present and other info available through whatever means a player can figure out some plot, but you as the DM do not believe for sure that his character would gain the same conclusion.
See it as a tool which can go two ways, it also can be used to get the party back on the track without them feeling railroaded, it is just a dice challenge they can decide for their character the same way they would resolve a combat so it makes them feel good.

Within another system I do play with a group which contains one player who already played the adventure module before with the same DM. The DM clearly states if he thinks although the player "knows" some detail that his character would not, for whatever reason and therefore also would not act upon such information. Works well, and if in doubt the DM lets the player make a dice check.

 

[tetrasodium]

Those 52 % of you in the "sometimes or more" category:
Are you guys all running Adventure Paths or at least some sort of metaplot-driven-game?

• My game is set in eberron & there are things going on with various groups being involved in various things. I don't really run APs but will occasionally use heavily modified premade filler if I'm lazy or crunched for time. no on AP. I think probably no on the other depending on what you consider a "metaplot driven game"?

Everyone:
Are any of you using 'Success at a Cost' (DMG 242) and could you see the following action resolution handling occur in your game?

• I ran Fate games for a couple years & that was an important part of the system with tools for the GM to push back & such... but that was always a concept that players had a difficult time simply grasping rather than treating it like the flaws table in old versions of d&d where you went out of your way to make sure the cost was irrelevant. With that said. I've toyed with it at times in d&d, but all things considered the system just lacks too much of the needed structure for something like this to have teeth

Situation: The PCs pass through a Fey Crossroads into the Feywild and must find their way from their unknown point in an enchanted frozen forest of perpetual night to the Dawnmote (lets say its a Winter Fey guarded oasis in this place that doubles as a means to travel to the Summer Fey's domain).

To your South and West, a stand of trees rise to extraordinary heights before the darkness cuts off what lies atop them. The trees sway rhythmically with unseen wind (or something else). To your North and East, a precarious field of ice stretches out before you in all directions, eerily cracking and groaning. There is no breeze. There is nothing.

Let us say the Survival Proficient Fighter figures that maybe the heat of the Dawnmote is creating a pressure gradient which generates the unseen wind upon the stand of trees.

Wisdom (Survival) check of 18 vs DC 20.

GM (success but an obstacle that changes the nature of the situation): "It almost must be so. In the moments you think on this and get your bearings, the groaning ice fractures, sending cracking tendrils this way and that. Its coming apart beneath your feet...and by torchlight, you can see something...moving...beneath the ice...

What do you do?!

Questions:

a) Would this be a case where (i) the Fighter's action declaration and result was allowed to stipulate the location of the Dawnmote in the setting...or (ii) would this be a case where you would simply say "no" because you or your AP or your hexcrawl has a preordained "Dawnmote" location?

b) Is this an obstacle that you would allow to emerge from the Success With Cost/Complication? What do you feel about the "to be determined thing" beneath the ice? The roll generated that bit of fiction along with the icefield hazard. Yes? Too much? What other complications would you envision being appropriate?

• Either I'm very much not understanding the example or I just fail to see the relevance of the attempted fate declaration. Near as I can tell.
  -to the left (sw) are tall trees moving for no apparent reason
  • To the right(NW) is a field of ice
  • Player wants to use survival to declare that some mcguffin is causing the trees to sway?
  • Player fails & the ice is now underfoot rather than to the right? A monster is also attacking because?....
• dawnmote doesn't seem to give any results on google & I thought I at least had a basic ubderstanding of the other FR bits noted.
• I feel like this example is so confusing that there is probably some setting specific lore tied to a few of those words that I am unaware of & just googling the wrong bits to make it click
• Someone else mentioned it that d&d lacks any mechanics for a player to declare a plot/story detail but also the dc20 might as well be dc triangle as there are too many unknowns. Because of all that I tried to give some examples pulled from things other than d&d
  • Alice is trying to avoid that green ray the beholder fired on her, rather than the 17 (or whatever) she needed, she only got a 16. Gm decides she did ok, but in the process caused one of the pillars supporting the glass ceiling to collapse, now glass is falling on the party (who cares, Alice succeeded on not getting disintegrated). GMs do this kinda stuff all the time but it's called things like fudging rolls & such
  • Bob has a plan to deal with the beholder but needs an elevated position (who cares why). Bob asks if there is a tapestry or chandelier he can swing across in order to get to the mezzanine. This is cool, the DC is zero because bob is being dramatic.
• In a system like fate you can have succeed at cost meaningful, but that's really only because all of the tools a PC has at their disposal can be constrained by the "cost". In d&d it's more like failing upward & pretty much all of the examples in that dmg section are of the "if this fails, I need to get the info to them somehow anyways", "Who cares", or "why were you even asking for a roll?" variety
  
  - "
• "A character manages to get her sword past a hobgoblin's defenses and turn a near miss into a hit, but the hobgoblin twists its shield and disarms her. " A little contrived, but ok maybe. This is the sort of thing that can be cool & cut both ways. The problem is that it's normally just "Fudging dice rolls".
• "A character narrowly escapes the full brunt of a fireball but ends up prone." Who cares? They just took half damage (or no damage) from a fireball & even if they are prone but surrounded by baddies the baddies took damage too & ranged attacks are at disadvantage.
• "A character fails to intimidate a kobold prisoner, but the kobold reveals its secrets anyway while shrieking at the top of its lungs, alerting other nearby monsters.". um... this is a kobold "prisoner" not "a kobold who just wandered into the store room where the players were resting" This is the sort of thing that would happen no matter what.
• "A character manages to finish an arduous climb to the top of a cliff despite slipping, only to realize that the rope on which his companions dangle below him is close to breaking. " This is actually a good one & the sort of thing you might see often, but really all it means is that the urgency to stop dangling is on. The rope did its job & now you have a challenge or something I think d&d has something (possibly in a ua?) that is similar, the success at cost would be one of the dangling party members dropping their pack/weapon/etc & sticking to the cliff rather than splattering on the ground below.

 

[Quickleaf]

Maybe you're one of those GMs and you'd like to post your thoughts on (a) why the output of Int/Wis Abillit/Skill action resolution is handled this way, (b) how it affects/propels play, and (c) how it intersects with the type of PC build decision-point thinking cited above?

I like the approach used by Robin Laws in the GUMSHOE role-playing game, where he gives a breakdown of core clues vs. secondary clues (paraphrasing). I've found the critical question is: "Which information is essential for the players to move forward with the main story they're focused on?" I do not "gate" that essential information behind any check. I just give it to the players when they investigate/reach the appropriate scene.

However, when it comes to non-essential information – monster lore, place lore, faction lore, magic lore, etc. – that's where ability checks (often Intelligence) to recall information come in.

The only exception I can think of to using this approach is if a DM is running a pure sandbox, where there is no "main story" and that, when the players cannot pursue one direction (e.g. due to lack of information), they are expected to flip direction on a dime and pursue another hook. I've never run a pure sandbox, and usually there's a main story the players focus on, so this approach works well for me.

I dislike the lack of stakes in how Intelligence checks are presented. If there are no consequence for a failed check – so there's nothing discouraging pile-on checks or repeating checks – then why roll at all?

Instead, what I do with failed lore checks is use them to either (a) feed misinformation to the players as if it were truth, which requires players who are game to play along, or (b) introduce a complication connecting the PC to the question they're asking (e.g. a failed Intelligence (History) check about a mercenary order might mean that the PC had a run-in with those mercenaries in the past, so there's bad blood; usually I'll introduce this along with a bit of token information but nothing revealing).

 

[Tony Vargas]

I dislike the lack of stakes in how Intelligence checks are presented. If there are no consequence for a failed check – so there's nothing discouraging pile-on checks or repeating checks – then why roll at all?

Pile-on checks are one of my pet peeves. One thing I like about strictly enforcing the play look or going all G&A, is that it means make checks only when I call for them.
Another solution that I implemented after encountering the Group Check (BTW, one of those "why didn't I think of that? - no, wait, why didn't Gygax think of that in '73" type mechanics), was that piling on resulted in a group check, as everyone weighed in with their own opinions, rumors, speculations & preconceived notions (rather like an forum discussion really), debated for a bit and came to a consensus - more than half failures and that consensus was wrong.

 

[Nagol]

"They're mostly for uncovering plot info and, well...the DM has to get that to you somehow."

No, I don't. If the players didn't discover it in play and don't have the skills to already know about it, it sucks to be them.

Will I use checks as information sources? Yes. Will I use the mere fact a skill is trained as an information source? Yes, for more widely known stuff. Will I let the players not discover something that would have been adventure-changing had it been known? Yep. That's a meaningful consequence of character design / table play.

 

[Blue]

Maybe you're one of those GMs and you'd like to post your thoughts on (a) why the output of Int/Wis Abillit/Skill action resolution is handled this way, (b) how it affects/propels play, and (c) how it intersects with the type of PC build decision-point thinking cited above?

I've learned that you need to give every clue three times.

So I don't make having the correct knowledge skills a gatekeepter for getting the knowledge, I make it one of many paths, expecting my players to be abel to find multiple of them so it sticks.

"Hey, we heard that before. Maybe it's important."

Those checks also give out a lot of useful and actionable information, not just exposition.

 

[5ekyu]

As the person quoted in the OP I want to say that I feel a lot of this thread is missing (what I at least) considered the main point.

I wasn't interested in the game grinding to a halt because a PC fails a skill. I'm just going to assume that most GMs who run into this issue are going to resolve it somehow - if only because a halted game obviously has to start again. In any case, as several posters have pointed out, this isn't necessarily a issue in sandbox games (Although if the GM wants to give exposition about their setting they've prepared it would still be silly to withold it because everyone rolled low).

The point I was making is that, given that, these skills aren't really all that important.

I mean yes, they can help reinforce the role-play of the learned character who knows a lot of stuff - but this is really more colour. (And is actually better done by the player having some source of knowledge they can feed through their character. If you're playing in the Forgotten Realms and want to show your knowledge of history it's better if the player knows stuff about Netheril. It's a bit weird if the player is rolling so the GM can exposit and then the character can pass that along. - Yes the GM may insist that if the PC wants to spout knowledge about Netheril than they have to take the skill but that's the tail wagging the dog - it's because the skill exists in the first place).

Similarly, in a Sandbox game a player who has the skill may be able to get info that wouldn't otherwise be available and allows them options, but like the plot driven game it's a bit of a game of chicken - the GM is giving options anyway - if the GM doesn't give the PCs meaningful choices than again the game halts. Lore works better in a sandbox game if players are acting on knowledge they uncover over the course of the game anyway. (Or at least if the knowledge the PCs have is shared by the players).

But to get back to expertise - the most important thing it does is reduce your chance of failure. The penalty for failure on knowledge skills is...?

The penalty for failure on stealth or disguise or deception could be much more severe. These proficiencies also open up whole new active avenues of approach. The master of disguise has far more opportunities to make a proactive impact on the game (to a degree - 5E's skill system does a poor job of rewarding proactive skill use - and Expertise is merely the poorly improvised band-aid put on top to partially fix this).

Also: I wouldn't try and run D&D like Gumshoe. Gumshoe already exists and is better at being Gumshoe.

"But to get back to expertise - the most important thing it does is reduce your chance of failure. The penalty for failure on knowledge skills is...?"

Remember, in 5e, a failure can be some progress with setback. So, it's possible for a failure to give you say three info nits, one good that will add new opportunities, one bad which leads you astray and a third which actually makes things worse by exposing you to the enemy in a worse way. That is not altogether different than a failed stealth check.

Also, maybe the recalled bits of info "reveal" that groups are searching for a macguffin of blue rose and that the dark lord is vulnerable to macguffin of of blue rose because they were used in his creation...

But while the first part is true the second part is misinfo and really the dark lord wants it to increase his power by making a bride.

So, by hjnying down the macguffin, bringingbit to the dark lord, they help him instead of leaving him hunting.

Like stealth and the other skills, failure can be a setback not just a null.